Since it first appeared in the late 1990’s, the term “cloud computing” has continued to change, adapt, innovate and revolutionize how businesses work.
From comparatively simple “off-site hosting” to load-balancing, public, private and hybrid clouds, SaaS applications and managed services, cloud is now a fully established and critical part of most organizations’ IT strategy.
Now, we are welcoming another exciting development in cloud computing, one that gives enterprises increased flexibility on where workloads are hosted, on-cloud or off-cloud.
I recently spoke at Google’s “Anthos Day” in New York City, which highlighted the new cloud management platform. Google Anthos lets enterprises build and manage modern hybrid applications on existing on-premises investments or in the public cloud. Effectively enabling companies to build and operate containerized software applications across cloud and on-premises environments. It’s an exciting technology that has the potential to shape the future of cloud strategy in the following ways:
- Choice: customers demand choice. Depending on the type of workload – high storage, archive needs, or high transaction volume and I/O or specific compliance or regulatory needs – it is best to have the choice of what infrastructure and platform solution to use. Anthos provides the flexibility of deploying solutions in our own cloud, or in GCP or for that matter, in AWS or Azure as well. This allows us to serve more customers and enable the great cloud migration.
- Management: Anthos console provides a single pane of glass that we can leverage to manage and monitor workloads across different cloud instances. This reduces overhead and standardized the monitoring and alerting which is critical to support thousands of customers at scale.
- Open source: Anthos is open source – based on K8s. This allows us to develop and contribute back to the community to hence enable the success for our customers.
As I covered in my previous blog, enterprises are defining their transformational journey to the cloud by choosing one of the five patterns of cloud adoption. Technologies and approaches like Google Anthos provide the common architectural framework needed to deliver EIM as a managed service off-cloud, on the OpenText Cloud, Google Cloud or any other cloud environment.
I’m excited about the potential impact a platform agnostic application management framework like Anthos will have – both on our products and services, and on our customers’ success, and we look forward to working with Google as part of our strategic partnership.
